Big news from Small Hall: A new telescope and a vintage generator

Out with the oldPhysicists ease an 1859-vintage scientific instrument into its displace case in the Small Hall lobby under the watchful supervision of John McKnight (far side of case), emeritus faculty member.
Photo by Joseph McClain

In with the newBob Vold zeroes in the new telescope inside the new dome of the new observatory atop Small Hall. Vold, director of the observatory, has zeroed in the computer-controlled astronomical apparatus.
Photo by Joseph McClain

It’s been out with the old and in with the new for the
physicists in Small Hall.

An 1859 scientific instrument came out—out of storage, that
is—to reside in a new display case in the building’s lobby. The “new” is on the
roof, where the department’s new telescope has been installed inside the new
rooftop observatory atop the physics building. These are the finishing touches
to the massive Small Hall addition and reconstruction that ended in 2011.

The expansion added 21,000 square feet for the physicists,
including a newly constructed 17,320-square-foot laboratory wing. The
physicists had moved into their offices and labs before the school year
started, but the observatory was still unfinished.

The vintage instrument is an electrostatic charge generator;
it had pride of place in the old Small Hall lobby, too. Professor Emeritus John
McKnight, who has served as an unofficial historian of the physics department
and its instruments, was on hand to supervise the installation of the
generator. He said the generator was one of numerous scientific instruments
purchased following a disastrous fire that gutted what’s now known as the Wren
Building.

“I think it’s amazing that right after the Fire of 1859 they
were able to collect so much money and were able to buy a bunch of equipment,”
McKnight said. He notes that the generator’s provenance is well documented in
archived correspondence between William & Mary President Benjamin Stoddart
Ewell and William Barton Rogers, a former William & Mary faculty member who
had moved to the Boston area, and who would be instrumental in the founding of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a couple of years.

“In that correspondence, there is a description of equipment
from E.S. Ritchie and Sons, a scientific supply company in Cambridge, to be
sent down here,” McKnight explained. “This is one of those pieces.”

Safe storage during
the Civil War

Equally interesting, McKnight says, is the strategy Ewell used
to safeguard the devices during the Civil War.

“President Ewell and the faculty and all the students
marched off to war,” he said. “But before that he wanted to put these expensive
pieces equipment in a safe place.”

McKnight said the safest place Ewell could think of was the
Eastern Lunatic Asylum, now known as Eastern State Hospital. “No army went
there,” he added. Ewell’s instrument cache remained safe, even as the war raged
all around Williamsburg and their former home, the Wren Building, burned once
again, in 1862, at the hands of some Pennsylvania cavalrymen.

Professor of Physics Todd Averett says he has taken on the
mantle of curator for the department’s vintage instrument collection. The
collection includes a large number of literal museum pieces, but McKnight says
the only 18th century item in the collection is an antique air pump purchased
in London around 1976. Any instruments used by William Small, the professor of
natural philosophy who included Thomas Jefferson among his pupils, were lost in
the 1859 fire, he said.

Even without a tangible connection to the career of William
Small, the vintage instrument collection is quite impressive. Smaller
instruments in display cases along the lobby walls will join the electrostatic
charge generator, Averett added.

Edison was 12; Tesla
was 3

The generator is essentially a glass wheel suspended between
a pair of large brass balls. A natural philosopher wanting to study electricity
would make his own, Averett said. A crank would turn the wheel, which would
pick up a static charge from a set of wool pads. The charge built up in the two
conductors—the brass balls.

William & Mary scientists began using the generator to
study the properties of electricity in the same year that Thomas Edison turned
12 and Nikola Tesla had his third birthday. The natural philosophers of the day
even had apparatus for storing the charge they worked so hard to build up.
Safely hidden out at the asylum, it survived the Civil War, as well.

“It’s a capacitor. I call it the zeppelin,” Averett says,
pointing to what resembles a four-foot-long metal cigar mounted on rollers. He
explained that the zeppelin was a companion instrument to the generator and
made electricity portable. Scientists would wheel the zeppelin to one end of
the generator and pick up the charge from one of the spherical conductors on
the generator, then roll it down the corridors of the Wren Building for study
of what then was usually referred to as the “electrical fluid.”

Meanwhile up on the
roof of Small Hall

While other members of the physics department were moving
the electrostatic field generator, Bob Vold, director of the physics
department’s new observatory, was putting the new Meade 14-inch ACF reflecting telescope
through its paces.

He put on a daytime demonstration for a set of visitors,
which included McKnight, a former director of the observatory. Vold explained
the challenges of installing the telescope and its equally important mount on
the roof of Small Hall.

“The first thing you have to do when you’re installing a
telescope is to make sure the mount is aligned to north,” Vold said. “That’s
pretty hard to do with a compass when you have a 17.6 tesla magnet right over
there.”

He was able to get a true north line on the roof the
old-fashioned way, by using the stars. Once the mount was aligned and the
telescope itself mounted, Vold zeroed it in, “training” the controller software
that aims the telescope and rotates the dome.

“Basically you point the scope to about fifty or sixty
different stars in the catalog. You center them in the eyepiece and then the
software makes a model of that,” he explained. “That result is you can move the
cursor on the star map on the computer, click on a star, and it is right in the
field of view of the high power eyepiece without any further alignment. I’ve
done that all over the sky and it really works well.”

Vold sat at a laptop and clicked on a star chart. The dome
rotated until the shutter was in the proper position and the mount rotated and
tiled the scope. He was able to show visitors a nice crescent Venus and a
number of first-magnitude stars. The impromptu presentation was sprinkled with
anecdotes of students in introductory astronomy classes who can’t believe that
“the stars are out in the daytime” and details of other features of the
observatory.

The observatory is fully operational now, just in time for
the June 5 transit of Venus. Every hundred-odd years, Venus crosses between
earth and the sun. Transits come in pairs about eight years apart, Vold
said—and the 2012 event is the second of the pair. The last pair of transits
occurred in 1874 and 1882, an era in which the faculty probably were still
using the electrostatic field generator.

Vold notes that a cloudy evening will spoil the view of the
transit. He also notes that the Small Hall observatory is not the ideal place
to view the event, because the transit will start at 6:22 p.m. and even though
it is less than halfway finished by sunset at 8:25 p.m. the view will be blocked
after about 7:30 p.m. by a section of Small Hall .

“But I think I’m going to be up here anyway,” Vold said,
gesturing around the new observatory. “I can bring my camera up here and attach
it to the scope. I could get a longer viewing somewhere else, but not with this
telescope.”